Mass. Market: Exporting the success of Duxbury’s shellfish farms

Jon Chesto

Monday

Mar 29, 2010 at 12:01 AMMar 29, 2010 at 6:12 PM

As a scientist, Hauke Kite-Powell sees the ocean as a relentless and rewarding research subject. For oyster farmer Skip Bennett, it’s a reliable source of food and financial stability. Their perspectives complement each other in an unusual project that they are spearheading off the east coast of Africa.

As a scientist, Hauke Kite-Powell sees the ocean as a relentless and rewarding research subject. For oyster farmer Skip Bennett, it’s a reliable source of food and financial stability.

Their two perspectives aren’t necessarily at odds with each other. In fact, they can be quite complementary – as evidenced in an unusual project that the two Duxbury residents are spearheading on an island off the east coast of Africa.

There, on the main island of the Zanzibar archipelago, you’ll find numerous fishing villages where many people live on less than $1 a day. During a recent outage that lasted three months, the only electricity came from privately owned generators. The sole source of income for many women is seaweed farming or gathering shellfish in the sand.

However, Kite-Powell and Bennett are working on a more reliable way for hundreds of African women to earn a living: They’re building a system that could support a new industry of shellfish farming. They just returned from a trip to Zanzibar, where a crew set up a hatchery at the University of Dar es Salaam’s Institute for Marine Sciences this month. The goal is to eventually produce several million juvenile shellfish a year there that can be distributed to local villagers who can run their own shellfish farms.

The game plan is a familiar one for Bennett, who led the effort to establish Duxbury’s now famous oyster farming industry in the 1990s.

Bennett runs Island Creek Oysters, which distributes oysters to restaurants and other buyers on behalf of about a dozen oyster farmers in Duxbury as well as his own farm. He had been looking for a food-related project that could benefit from his company’s foundation and its annual oyster festival when he learned about Kite-Powell’s research work.

Getting a sustainable shellfish system going in Zanzibar has been a major goal of Kite-Powell’s for some time. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researcher says he started going to Zanzibar, an archipelago that’s part of Tanzania, about 15 years ago to help locals develop finfish farming techniques. Kite-Powell switched his focus to shellfish about six years ago and began sowing the seeds for the hatchery project three years later.

Bennett agreed to assist the project about a year ago, as it gave him the chance to fulfill a goal of funding work that could help provide food in an impoverished area and give the Duxbury farmers a way to participate. The route to commercial production for the hatchery could take up to three years and is budgeted to cost about $80,000 a year (the U.S. dollar goes a long way in Tanzania). The Island Creek Foundation will fund the bulk of the project, with some help from the McKnight Foundation, a longtime benefactor of Kite-Powell’s.

During the coming months, Kite-Powell, Bennett and their colleagues will work to figure out the best way to efficiently raise shellfish in the hatchery and produce juvenile shellfish for the would-be farmers. Kite-Powell says the focus is on Anadara clams, native mollusks that taste like New England quahogs.

The researchers have already begun growing the plankton that will be fed to the clams, and the first shellfish spawning occurred in holding tanks in the past few weeks. But the researchers still have a ways to go before they’re ready to start collecting and widely distributing shellfish for planting in the local seabed.

They’ve hired a few other experts from this area to get the job done: Duxbury’s John Brawley helped train the locals about the nuances of shellfish growing, Rick Karney of Martha’s Vineyard helped design the hatchery, and oyster farmer Andy Yberg is still in Zanzibar, ensuring that the hatchery runs smoothly in its early weeks.

Bennett, who is volunteering his time as well as his foundation’s money, has been to Zanzibar twice and hopes to go back again in the fall. The visits, he says, have forced him to rethink the relatively luxurious lifestyles we lead in the United States. Something as simple as a car ride back home from the airport, for example, can be a jarring experience after visiting a place where just about everyone gets around by walking.

The eventual goal is to get the shellfish hatchery efficient enough so it can be weaned off the two foundations’ support and funded instead by the local farmers who will benefit from it. Kite-Powell says he’s hopeful the hatchery – the first of its kind in East Africa – proves to be a model that can be replicated up and down the coast.

Among its many bounties, the ocean has provided rewarding professions for both Bennett and Kite-Powell. Now, it’s their turn to return the favor.

Jon Chesto is the business editor at The Patriot Ledger. He may be reached at jchesto@ledger.com.

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